Research
Do I need to rank on page one to show up in Google's AI Overview?
You do not, because only 38% of the pages Google's AI Overview cites also rank in the top ten for the same search. Ahrefs measured that in March 2026 on 4 million cited pages across 863,000 searches, more than double their previous sample.
Roughly 31% of the quoted pages sit between positions 11 and 100, which is page two onwards. Another 31% rank past 100 or never appear in the regular results at all. That is close to a third of what the AI Overview quotes, from places no customer would ever scroll to.
Your gut says the AI Overview just reads Google's own top ten and sums it up, since the same company runs both. The numbers point the other way. Google moved AI Overviews to the Gemini 3 model in January. Since then it seems to pull from a far wider pool than the visible rankings and takes whichever page answers the exact question best.
One source stands out inside that bottom 31%, and it is YouTube. Ahrefs found YouTube makes up 18% of the quotes that do not come from top-ten pages, against 5.6% of all AI Overview sources. It also grew 34% in six months and became the most-quoted site in the whole study. A video nowhere near page one can still be exactly what the AI Overview decides to show.
If you run a local business, the hours you put into your Google ranking still count, and a spot on page one does nothing to hurt your chances. The mistake is treating it as the finish line. A separate system with its own rules decides whether you get named in the answer a customer reads first. That system reads far below the ten links a human sees and takes whichever page states the answer most cleanly, at spot 4 or spot 40.
I want to be upfront about one limit. Our probes track which businesses ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity name and where each mention lands inside the answer. They never look at where that page ranks on Google. So the Ahrefs finding covers a different AI surface from the one we test, and I am not claiming our data proves the same pattern. The shape does match what we have measured so far, though: directories and Reddit threads that no owner would think to rank for keep beating polished business sites on every engine we have checked.
Here is what I would do with this, in order. First, keep your SEO work and stop treating "we rank on page one" as proof that the job is done. Second, pick the questions customers ask you in person and give each one its own page that answers in the first two lines, in the words a customer would use. Third, if you have video sitting on your site or in a channel nobody watches, put it on YouTube under the question it answers. The AI Overview may prefer that over your homepage. Fourth, stop guessing from a ranking report and ask the AI directly, the way a customer would.
Our Quick Check does that last step for you. It runs your business name and city against the same three engines and tells you in 30 seconds whether any of them know you exist, with no signup needed.